Nine Lives - Danielle Steel Page 0,1

with the thrill of flying planes, he’d be alive today. He could have been anything. A carpenter, a plumber, a teacher, a contractor, but instead he loved danger. Every time Tommy said he wanted to fly planes too when he grew up, Emma told him, in a harsh voice, that he’d better think of something else to do if he didn’t want to kill himself. They learned not to talk about their father, or flying.

Harry was a decent man. He was quiet, serious, he didn’t laugh or tell funny stories like their dad, and he didn’t talk to her or Tommy much. But their mom said he had a good job. They moved into an apartment together a year after they met. Their mom told them that she and Harry were engaged. They got married a month later.

Maggie was fifteen when they got married at city hall. The four of them had lunch at a restaurant afterwards. Harry went to work as usual that night, there was a big convention in town. He was nice enough to them, and Maggie didn’t mind him. He had no children of his own, and he tried to be a father to them, but he always worked until late at night, running the catering side of the conventions at the hotel. Emma seemed happy with him, but her eyes never lit up the way they had when she heard Kevin drive up or when he walked into the room. Her life with Harry was different. They both worked hard, and Maggie and Tommy were home alone a lot of the time until their mom came home from work. Sometimes Maggie had cooked dinner for herself and Tommy by then. They weren’t a family the way they had been when their father was alive. They didn’t do things together or have fun, they just lived in the same house. And they knew Harry would come home from work every night. Nothing he did was dangerous, and in time, the look of panic left her mother’s eyes. Harry wasn’t glamorous or exciting, but he was reliable.

Harry sat in front of the TV when he came home at night and drank a few beers. He stayed up late, and was still asleep when they left for school in the morning. He never had anything to say to them anyway. He told Emma he wasn’t used to kids. Once a week, he would give Maggie a crisp twenty-dollar bill, and tell her to go to a movie with her friends, or buy something. He bought Tommy a football once, but didn’t have time to play with him. The weekly twenty-dollar bill was the only real contact Maggie had with him. Her mother seemed like a different person now, as though something inside her had died when their father did.

When Maggie was sixteen and Tommy eleven, a year after Emma and Harry got married, Harry was transferred to a bigger hotel in Chicago that was part of the same chain. It was a better job, with more money and more responsibility. Emma wasn’t happy about it. She said they’d never see him. He’d be working all the time. They moved anyway, and got a nicer apartment than the one they’d had in Miami. Maggie missed Florida and her friends every day. The school she went to in Chicago was much bigger than her high school in Miami. Tommy went to a different school, a few blocks from hers, and he didn’t like it either.

Emma wanted to move to the suburbs, but Harry said he needed to live close to work. They had offered her a job in the hotel gift shop, and sometimes she snuck downstairs to visit Harry. They had been together for two years by then, and Maggie thought they seemed like strangers with each other. She tried to ask her mother about it sometimes, and Emma said she liked their life because it was safe. She said that was all she wanted now. She had put away all the pictures of Kevin, but Maggie had kept two of them in a drawer in her desk, where she could see them anytime, and she’d given Tommy one of their father in his flight uniform.

Harry looked like a fat little old man compared to their father. Kevin had been tall and lean, with a smile that wouldn’t quit. Emma was thirty-two years old when he died, thirty-seven when she met Harry, and thirty-nine now. Maggie